Jonathan Rauch Quotes

You have a lot of support right now, but once you get a lot of casualties, this thing is going to change.

Americans will stomach long wars only when the nation’s survival is clearly at stake.

Any great war must be a popular movement.

By God, you can't fight a war unless the people support it.

Uncle Sam’s Latest Greatest Shortest War

When the political and military levels … want to initiate operational war they want to gain as much public support as possible. So whether they do it deliberately or not, they tend to promise that it will be much better than the way that it really could be. Now when the reality comes true and suddenly the results … are different from the expectations and the promises, then the frustration comes to be a very important factor.

In a war, the hearts and minds of the people on the home front are just as important as the hearts and minds of those in the war zone.

We’ve got to get out of Vietnam or else we have to educate the people as to why we are in there.

The will of the people determines the final outcome of any war.

We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. But I can't give up a piece of territory as big as South Vietnam and still have the people re-elect me.

I would not plan to base my campaign primarily on opposition to the war in the Persian Gulf.

58% of the American public are with us. We're preaching to the choir, but the choir's not singing, if all of the 58% started singing, this war would end.

The president, clearly as a result of the war and the afterglow of the war, is in a time of great attention.

More than half the combat deaths in Vietnam occurred after Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to bring the war to an end, and after the American people had already decided that they did not want one more soldier to die in Vietnam.

The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

President Bush spent last night calling world leaders to support the war with Iraq and it is sad when the most powerful man on earth is yelling, 'I know you're there, pick up, pick up.

American boys should not be seen dying on the nightly news. Wars should be over in three days or less, or before Congress invokes the War Powers Resolution.

The sustaining populace, on whose behalf wars are prosecuted, must be sufficiently convinced that its cause is just, that its wars are winnable and that the costs are not disproportionate.

This wretched war in Iraq which we never should have started, we don’t seem to be able to win, and we don’t know how to get out of …

It’s very easy to advocate going to war if you’re not one of the people who is going.

We will never know what would have happened if President Johnson had said no to more troops and more war [in Vietnam]. We do know what happened when he said yes.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism... The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each other.

Soldiers will continue to die in wars that few can convincingly explain why we are fighting.

Not every Congressionally declared war will be remembered as a “good war”, but few if any Presidentially declared wars, if any, will ever be.